Friday, October 31, 2014

...................................................................................................................................................................COMMENT: I wouldn't vote for a maggot or a Republican .. other than that I got nothing from this article.. Ok,, under certain conditions I might vote for the maggot.....................................................................................................................................................................How Maggots Can Reveal Whether You're Liberal Or Conservative
By Macrina Cooper-White, October 31, 2014

What do maggots have to say about your political leanings? A lot more than you might think.

"Remarkably, we found that the brain's response to a single disgusting image was enough to predict an individual's political ideology," Read Montague, a Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute psychology professor who led the study, said in a written statement.

For the study, 83 men and women viewed a series of images while having their brains scanned in a functional MRI (fMRI) machine. The images included the disgusting photos described above, along with photos of babies and pleasant landscapes.

Afterward, the participants were asked to rate how grossed out they were by each photo. They also completed a survey about their political beliefs, which included questions about their attitudes toward school prayer, gun control, immigration, and gay marriage.

There was no significant difference in how liberals and conservatives rated the photos. But the researchers noted differences between the two groups in the activity of brain regions associated with disgust recognition, emotion regulation, attention and even memory. The differences were so pronounced that the researchers could analyze a scan and predict the person's political leaning with 95 percent accuracy.

While the researchers believe these differences in our reactions to disgusting images are likely "hard-wired" into our brains--that is, inherited from our parents--they argue genes might affect our political views similar to the way they affect our height.

"Genetics predetermines height -– but not fully," Montague said in the statement. "Nutrition, sleep, and starvation can all change someone's ultimate height. But tall people's children tend to be tall, and that's a kind of starting point."

Montague added that accepting that our brains are built to have differing political views could help ease political tensions.

"If we can begin to understand that some automatic reactions to political issues may be simply that -- reactions -– then we might take the temperature down a bit in the current boiler of political discourse," he said.

The study will be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Current Biology.
...................................................................................................................................................................

...................................................................................................................................................................Guess Who’s About to Buy Congress
By George Zornick, October 29, 2014

The midterm elections are less than a week away, and money is pouring into contested states and districts at a furious pace. A new analysis from Public Citizen shows the biggest “dark money” spender is none other than the US Chamber of Commerce, a mega-trade group representing all sorts of corporations—and one that is spending exclusively to defeat Democrats in the general election.

The Chamber is a 501(c)(6) tax-exempt organization, meaning it doesn’t have to disclose its donors. We know from looking at its board, available membership lists and tax forms from big corporations that much of the Chamber’s money has generally come from titans in the oil, banking and agriculture industries, among others.

The Chamber is leaving a huge footprint in almost every race it enters. The report shows that, through October 25, the Chamber has spent $31.8 million. The second-largest dark-money spender, Crossroads GPS, spent $23.5 million:Among the report’s other findings:

The Chamber is averaging $908,000 per race it enters

The Chamber is the biggest dark-money spender in twenty-eight of thirty-five races it entered.

Of the twelve contested Senate races, the Chamber is the top non-disclosing outside spender in seven of those races, spending an average of $1.7 million per state.

In the twenty-three House races in which the Chamber has spent over $11.5 million, it is the top spender in all but two of them.

The Chamber has spent mainly to either support Republicans or attack Democrats. The only money it spent against Republicans came early in the year during GOP primaries to support business-friendly Republican candidates.

Thanks to weak campaign finance laws, however, we will likely never know who exactly is bankrolling this massive presence in the midterm elections.“When large corporations decide they want to get their own candidates into office but they don’t want to be seen doing it, they call the US Chamber,” said Lisa Gilbert, director of Public Citizen’s Congress Watch division. “These politicians then push for anti-environmental, anti-consumer and anti-health policies and priorities that hurt everyday Americans.”
...................................................................................................................................................................

...................................................................................................................................................................This GOP Senate Candidate Was Just Caught in a Koch Brothers LieDespite her clear history of close association with the Koch brothers, Joni Ernst claims she doesn't have any contact with outside groups running ads in her race.
By Lauren Windsor, October 27, 2014

On Thursday, October 23, I went to a local chamber of commerce meeting in Iowa to talk to Joni Ernst, the Republican candidate for the US Senate, about her support for the Koch brothers agenda, which emphasizes extreme cuts to government spending. I asked her specifically about Social Security and Medicare, which she has advocated privatizing, and about which agencies she would eliminate from the federal budget. Ernst admitted that privatization is “an option” on the table, but was unresponsive as to particular agencies.

The Ernst agenda is clearly aligned with the Koch brothers ideology, and as you probably remember from my earlier reporting, she attended the Koch retreat in June and spoke on a candidate panel, crediting them with “start[ing] her trajectory” in politics. The candidate was effusive in her praise for the Koch network, and various leaders from their groups, like Aegis, Americans for Prosperity, and Freedom Partners, returned the love. Said the moderator of her panel, “I think it’s fair to say you’ve exceeded everyone’s expectations.”

The purpose of Ernst’s panel at the retreat was to pitch donors, whom they called “investors,” for each candidate and their respective races. The activities of Koch-funded groups were explicitly discussed, as were the massive spending on ad buys. In spite of this clear history of close association, when asked about the flood of negative ads in Iowa, Joni Ernst claimed to these business leaders in Des Moines that she doesn’t have any contact with outside groups running ads in her race.

Bottom line, Joni Ernst told a whopper. We know she had contact with the various organizations in the Koch network in June. According to OpenSecrets.org, Americans for Prosperity has spent nearly a quarter of a million dollars in her race, and Freedom Partners Action Fund has spent over 3 million. Both organizations have spent heavily on negative advertising.
...................................................................................................................................................................

...................................................................................................................................................................COMMENT:Can you imagine this man meeting with world leaders? Angela Merkel questions something he's done and he tells HER to shut up and sit down? Or what if it's Netenyahu? Or anyone else, really - other countries question the USA and its actions EVERY DAY. He's a thin-skinned jerk without a single diplomatic bone in his body. He should never get any closer to the White House than that fence.
...................................................................................................................................................................Will Christie's 'sit down and shut up' style work outside New Jersey?

'Iowans don't like Chris Christie, and they're never going to — he's not Iowa nice'

By Dylan Stableford, October 30, 2014

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's brash style of politics was on full display Wednesday when he told a heckler critical of the state's response to Superstorm Sandy to "sit down and shut up."

“Somebody like you doesn’t know a damn thing about what you're talking about, except to stand up and show off when the cameras are here," Christie told the heckler, later identified as Jim Keady, at an event marking the second anniversary of Sandy in Belmar, N.J. "I've been here when the cameras aren't here, buddy, and done the work. Turn around, get your fifteen minutes of fame, and then, maybe, take your jacket off, roll up your sleeves, and do something for the people of this state.

"So listen, you want to have the conversation later, I'm happy to have it, buddy," Christie continued. "But until that time, sit down and shut up."

"I still have plenty of Jersey in me," Christie later joked, "so when it comes to having a little 'back-and-forth,' I will not hesitate to have a little 'back-and-forth.'"

While that kind of "back-and-forth" might play well in New Jersey, where the governor won reelection in a landslide last year, it remains to be seen if it would play as well on the national stage, should Christie seek the 2016 Republican presidential nomination.

Christie may be about to find out. On Thursday, he embarked on a five-day, 19-state tour stumping for GOP candidates before next week's midterm elections. On Thursday, Christie was scheduled to visit Iowa, where just five days ago, he attacked President Barack Obama while campaigning for Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad.

“We have an extraordinary vacuum of leadership in this country, and people both inside America and outside America no longer know what America stands for,” Christie said at a Oct. 25 fundraiser for Branstad. “It’s because of the lack of leadership we have in the White House. It has been six long years, but I bring you good news: There are only two more years left.”

“Worse than the lack of accomplishment in Washington, D.C., and the frustration that our people feel is what’s happening around the world,” he said. “America is not being respected around the world the way we used to be, and we’re not being respected because we no longer mean what we say and say what we mean.”

There is some anecdotal evidence that Christie's tough talk could woo some Iowans.

“I think he’s one of the few people who could work with both sides,” another said. “I think he sticks out.”

But according to a Bloomberg Politics/Des Moines Register Iowa poll released earlier this month, just 6 percent of likely Republican caucus-goers surveyed said Christie would be their first choice for president in 2016. (Seven others, including Mitt Romney and Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, received better rankings.) And among possible GOP contenders, Christie received the highest unfavorable rating — 45 percent.

"Iowans don't like Chris Christie, and they're never going to," Steve Deace, a nationally syndicated Iowa radio talk show host, told Yahoo News. "He's not Iowa nice, and like a lot of self-important media concoctions, he mistakes phony bluster and being a jerk for passion and principle."

"Christie seems to think that channeling the Hulk like this will win him votes," Tom Moran wrote in the Newark Star-Ledger. "He might be right on the politics. American voters tend to pick presidents who are not like the last guy. Kennedy’s youth after Eisenhower’s old age. Carter’s integrity after Nixon’s treachery. Reagan’s strength after Carter’s weakness. President Obama is cool and detached, so Christie’s in-your-face combativeness may be just the ticket."

But in Iowa and New Hampshire, where the campaigning gets intimate in town halls and living rooms, Christie may have to leave his Hulk at home.

"Opponents of Christie, both Republicans and Democrats, are going to show up at those town halls if he runs for president, and try to provoke him," King said.
...................................................................................................................................................................

Senator Lindsey Graham did indeed offer up that stunner of a quote, though the South Carolina Republican says he was only telling jokes among friends.

The remark comes from audio CNN obtained via South Carolina Democrats. Graham told the network he made the comment a few weeks ago at a Hiberian Society of Charleston meeting where speakers are encouraged to "be earthy, to make fun of yourself."

Graham's full quote: "I'm trying to help you with your tax status. I'm sorry the government's so f--ked up. If I get to be president, white men in male-only clubs are going to do great in my presidency."
...................................................................................................................................................................
...................................................................................................................................................................Graham: Remark about helping white men was joke
By Jeffrey Collins, october 30, 2014

U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham's remark at a private, all-male dinner about mainly helping white men if he became president was a joke taken out of context, his campaign said Thursday.

But Graham's opponent, Democratic state Sen. Brad Hutto, said the comment shows he is a typical Republican who isn't concerned about the middle class, poor, minorities or women.

About 20 seconds of clips of Graham's speech were provided to The Associated Press, and Graham's campaign confirmed it was him speaking. CNN first reported the remarks Wednesday, less than a week before the election to decide whether Graham gets a third term in the Senate. He has outspent Hutto by a wide margin and is a big favorite to win in conservative South Carolina.

After using profanity to say the government is messed up, Graham tells the group: "If I get to be president, white men who are in male-only clubs are going to do great in my presidency."

Graham made the remarks as part of a 10-minute speech at the Hibernian Society of Charleston at a charity event where politicians are invited to give private speeches that are serious, but also include jokes told at their expense or to poke fun at the group. Graham's campaign said his intention with the joke was to needle the historically Irish Catholic group. A recording of his entire speech to the group has not surfaced.

"Senator Graham is confident the people of South Carolina will judge him based on his record of accomplishment and will also put in its proper perspective these jokes, which were taken out of context and delivered in a private, roast-type dinner before a well-respected charity in Charleston," Graham's campaign spokesman Tate Zeigler said in a statement.

His opponent said Graham showed his true self at the event. He pointed out Graham has voted or spoke out against bills aimed at establishing equal pay for women and raising the minimum wage and the Violence Against Women Act.

"When behind the closed doors of a private club, Lindsey Graham let his true colors show. He is only interested in his own ambitions and the best interests of the wealthy donors he hopes will fund his possible presidential campaign," Hutto said in a statement.

Graham has upset some people in his own party in recent years by saying Republicans must diversify and can't be the party of angry, white men if they want to remain relevant in American politics.

In the other clip from the Charleston meeting, Graham makes jokes about religion.

"Do we have any Presbyterians here?" Graham said, as laughter from the group drowns out the punchline. "Do we have any Baptists? They're the ones who drink and don't admit it. Methodists? Baptists who can't read."

Jokes are a staple of Graham's public remarks, and he frequently jokes about religion in his public speeches. He often points out that Americans settle their religious differences on the church softball field, while religious differences are sometimes settled through terror and war in the Middle East. After that, he segues into calling for a strong military to fight those threats.

Earlier this week, Graham told business leaders he thinks immigration reform has to be tied to changing Social Security and Medicaid because the nation needs more workers to support its aging population.

"Where do you get the workforce if 80 million Baby Boomers are going to retire unless you start having four kids after you are 67 like Strom (Thurmond)?" Graham asked, pausing before the punchline. "Any volunteers?"
...................................................................................................................................................................

Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) says that if the GOP retakes the Senate in the midterms, he would be willing to pursue an ObamaCare repeal through a controversial budget process called reconciliation.

Reconciliation is a tactic that allows the Senate to avert a filibuster and pass legislation with 51 votes. And McConnell believes the GOP "owe[s] it to the American people" to try to repeal the law via extraordinary measures, including reconciliation, if necessary, a McConnell spokesperson told The Washington Examiner.

Yet back in 2010, McConnell bemoaned Democratic threats to pass ObamaCare via reconciliation, saying it was "really the Democratic majority, in frankly a kind of arrogant way, saying we're smarter than you are." However, after the Supreme Court upheld the law's individual mandate as a tax, and with the GOP angling to retake the Senate in 2012, McConnell changed his tune.
...................................................................................................................................................................

Jon Stewart finally addressed the fact that the Koch brothers have been advertising on The Daily Show, and welcomed them to the program last night.

Stewart played the ad we’ve been noticing — you may have too and wondered, like us, why the Koch brothers are trying to buy Stewart’s audience. Heck, Stewart should be flattered the Koch brothers thought it was important to make one of their opinion-swaying ad buys on on his faux news show.

“Koch Industries. Started in the heartland. We help make better food, clothing, shelter, technologies, and other necessities,” began Sweet Voiceover Lady, sounding like someone bringing us good news from a distant land, as happy factory workers smile at the camera, chemists too, and even an adorable, crawling, diapered baby.

“We build on each others ideas to create more opportunity for people everywhere. We are Koch,” she added.

“Clearly, the Koch brothers are trying to say to our audience of not yet dying-off voters: ‘Even though you may have heard certain things about the Koch brothers, how bad could they be?'” Stewart snickered. “I mean, if they were evil, would a baby agree to appear in one of their advertisements?”

To welcome them to The Daily Show family Stewart re-played their ad — with a new voiceover he’d provided.

...................................................................................................................................................................'Koch Congress' could make oligarchy official
By Victor Menotti, October 25, 2014

At a time when most Americans agree that the country has too much power in too few hands, the world’s two wealthiest men are only six seats away from seizing the Senate and consolidating their current control of the House. The result could be a full “Koch Congress” that further rigs the rules in their favor.

Libertarian billionaires Charles and David Koch have a combined net worth four times that of well-known Democratic donor George Soros, and one hundred times that of Tom Steyer.

This summer, participants in the Kochs’ secret billionaires’ summit pledged to raise $500 million to take the Senate in 2014 midterm elections. After four decades of funding front groups and an elaborate ideology they call “economic freedom,” the Kochs embody today’s emerging American oligarchy. No one else can even compare.

At risk are the rights of all Americans, especially women, workers, voters, veterans, as well as the protection of our rapidly warming Earth, since the Kochs’ end game is to defend their carbon based wealth by continuing to pollute politics and the planet for free. In all the noise of this election season, there has been little discussion of the fact that two billionaire brothers are about to have “power of the purse” over the world’s wealthiest nation.

Koch capture of the GOP

Not even John D. Rockefeller ever managed to pull together a radical faction as powerful as Kochs have through today’s Tea Party. Nor has anyone moved so many moderate conservatives toward the Kochs’ personal philosophical approach and hardline policy agenda.

The Kochs’ core belief in “shrinking the state” drives conservatives’ manic brinkmanship in the nonstop budget battles that Tea Party types used to shut down the government and risk default over the debt ceiling. Along with entirely eliminating essential elements of federal government, such as the EPA, a Koch Congress would also squeeze other governments — from municipal to multilateral — who rely on federal funds for everything from disaster relief to fighting Ebola.

Around the 2012 election, Politico reported on the intra-Republican rivalry between Karl Rove and David Koch. However, it now appears as if Rove’s powerful SuperPAC, American Crossroads, is carrying Koch’s message in elections ads about the Keystone XL pipeline. Koch’s capture of GOP electoral operations may not be so surprising given that Rove himself is not rich and must raise money from others, whereas the Kochs draw from their own unparalleled personal fortune.

Senator Mitch McConnell could become Koch’s top guy in government under a Koch Congress, waging unrestrained war against the President at every turn, if not impeaching him outright. And Obama could be left with no Attorney General if Republicans refuse to approve any replacement for outgoing AG Eric Holder.

Voting rights would likely be rewritten by a Koch Congress, as mandated by a 2013 Supreme Court decision — brought to trial by the Koch-funded Center for Fair Representation — that rolled back the crown jewel of America’s civil rights struggle. Another Koch-funded group, ALEC, has been advancing similar strategies at the state level, where America’s voting laws are forged. Part of a plot? Call it highly organized greed.

For the first time, anyone online can now “follow the money” from Koch’s fossil fuels fortune [to] today’s political candidates at KochProblem.org. Learn about candidates’ links to Koch’s financial interests and the growing network of grassroots groups working across America to expose the Kochs’ efforts to take over Congress.

A full Koch Congress would weaken voting rights, minimum wage, pay equity, carbon regulations, and many other basic protections the American people have fought for, and won.
...................................................................................................................................................................

Speaker John Boehner is finding that out the hard way after a second law firm withdrew from representing the House in the Republican-led lawsuit against President Obama over his use—or overuse—of executive authority. William Burck of the Washington-based firm Quinn Emanuel pulled out of the case last month, not long after he signed a contract with the House to replace David Rifkin of BakerHostetler.

The law firms succumbed to political pressure from Democratic clients who threatened to pull their business.

In both cases, according to sources working on the issue, the law firms succumbed to political pressure from Democratic clients who threatened to pull their business if the firms represented the House GOP in a partisan suit. Congressional Democrats had decried Boehner's move as a waste of taxpayer money. They also successfully parlayed the planned lawsuit into a fundraising boon by telling liberal supporters it was a prelude to impeachment, which Boehner insisted was not the case.

But not only did the two firms withdraw, they ditched the case so quickly that neither of them performed enough work to bill the House, sources said. In an odd silver lining for House Republicans, nearly three months after they signed off on the lawsuit, not a single dollar of taxpayer money has been spent. It's also not a given that the legal proceedings, whenever they begin, will drag out beyond Obama's presidency. The expectation among staff working on the case is that a federal court, once the lawsuit is filed, could decide fairly quickly on whether it would go forward. There is little precedent for one chamber of Congress suing the president under these circumstances, and Republican staffers acknowledge the case could get thrown out.

House leaders have now all but given up on finding a new lawyer who will take the case, and Boehner is instead considering assigning the work to the chamber's in-house counsel, which is a position appointed by the speaker.

"The litigation remains on track," Boehner spokesman Kevin Smith said Thursday, "but we are examining the possibility of forgoing outside counsel and handling the litigation directly through the House, rather than through law firms that are susceptible to political pressure from wealthy, Democratic-leaning clients."

Another wild card is the likelihood that Obama will issue a broad executive order legalizing undocumented immigrants after the November election, a move that would inflame Republicans and generate calls for more legal action. In other words, the House could vote again in November or December to add immigration to the resolution authorizing a lawsuit over Obamacare.

"We are also closely following what the administration does on executive amnesty, and the possible impact that could have on the litigation strategy," Smith said.

Democrats, meanwhile, have turned from criticizing Boehner to mocking him. “Speaker Boehner cannot find a single lawyer in the entire country—even at $500 dollars an hour in taxpayer money—to file a lawsuit that is so totally devoid of any legal merit," said Drew Hammill, a spokesman for Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.

Burck did not return requests for comment. His firm's withdrawal was first reported by Politico on Wednesday night.
...................................................................................................................................................................

A Texas voter ID law considered to be one of the most restrictive in the country is doing exactly what Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg warned it would do: stopping Americans from voting.

A disabled woman in Travis County was turned away from voting because she couldn’t afford to pay her parking tickets. An IHOP dishwasher from Mercedes can’t afford the cost of getting a new birth certificate, which he would need to obtain the special photo ID card required for voting. A student at a historically black college in Marshall, who registered some of her fellow students to vote, won't be able to cast a ballot herself because her driver's license isn't from Texas and the state wouldn't accept her student identification card.

There are plenty of stories like this coming out of Texas in the early voting period leading up to Election Day. Texas' tough voter ID law, signed by Gov. Rick Perry in 2011, requires voters to show one of seven types of photo identification. Concealed handgun licenses are allowed, but college student IDs are not, nor are driver’s licenses that have been expired for more than sixty days.

The law has been the subject of an extensive legal battle, with a federal court finding it unconstitutional earlier this month. But the Supreme Court then rejected an emergency request to put the law on hold for the upcoming election. Ginsburg authored a blistering dissent to that decision, calling the law an "unconstitutional poll tax.” The ruling marked the first time in 32 years that the Supreme Court allowed a law restricting voting rights to be implemented after a federal court ruled it unconstitutional for targeting minorities, according to SCOTUSblog.

The early voting period is still going on in Texas, but voters and election officials told The Huffington Post there have already been problems casting ballots due to the new restrictive measure. Under the law, Texans without acceptable forms of identification must go to a driver’s license office to get a voting card. In Austin, 45-year-old Eric Kennie, who hasn't set foot outside the state his whole life, couldn't get his card because the birth certificate he struggled to afford lists his mother's maiden name. In Houston, an election judge claims thata 93-year-old veteranwas turned away from the polls because his driver's license had been expired for too long. Another 62-year-old womantold MSNBC that she was threatened with jail time when she went to obtain her voter ID because she was driving with a California license.

Dana DeBeauvoir, the clerk responsible for overseeing election conduct in Travis County, which has over one million people and includes the city of Austin, said she spoke this week to a 61-year-old disabled woman, Madeleine, who was “in tears” because she was turned away when she went to vote at a grocery store.

The low-income woman is on a payment plan with a court to pay off her parking tickets, DeBeauvoir said, and while she’s on the plan, her license is suspended. Now, Madeleine has to quickly get to a driver’s license office to get a voting card. Her disability qualifies her to vote by mail, but she missed that deadline because she didn’t know her license would be denied.

”She’s been voting every year since the day 18-year-olds got the right to vote, and now suddenly she finds out she’s lost her right to vote because of money,” DeBeauvoir said. “If she had money, she could just pay off the tickets [and] vote.”

DeBeauvoir noted that people who don’t have proper identification are offered a provisional ballot. After Election Day, voters only have six days to come back in and show identification, otherwise the ballot doesn’t count. So far, the county has received about twenty provisional ballots a day. It’s not clear yet how many of those are due to ID issues, but DeBeauvoir has heard stories from “older people who were born at home, disabled people who don't drive, who don't have the proper identification, and yet still want to vote.”

Chris Melody Fields Figueredo, manager of legal mobilization and strategic campaigns for the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said she’d heard reports from people who have been afraid to get voter IDs because they’re worried the government will run their traffic records and they’ll have to pay tickets on the spot. The driver’s license offices are “not supposed to do that,” she said, “but there has been this hesitation.”

Jesus Garcia, 40, was born in Texas. He has his voter card as well as an expired form of photo identification that works just fine for most purposes. But under the Texas law, that isn't enough proof, because his ID has been expired for too long. Getting another form of identification is difficult because his birth certificate, along with his wallet, was stolen about a year ago.

"I'm barely working, I don't have enough money to get my ID," Garcia, who works as a dishwasher at an IHOP restaurant, told HuffPost. He would have to pay roughly $30 to obtain a new copy of his birth certificate and a new card, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Garcia has made two trips to the Department of Public Safety to obtain an identification card, but has been unsuccessful. He believes the law was passed to make it more difficult for people like him to vote.

"If I had money to go get my birth certificate and all that, I wouldn't be having trouble right now," Garcia said. "But like I said, money's down."

Krystal Watson is a student at Wiley College, a historically black college in Marshall, Texas. She voted here before the new restrictions were enacted, and even registered fellow students to vote. But she didn't realize until recently that the restrictions would prevent her from casting a ballot this year because she has an out-of-state license. When she showed up to vote early, she found herself facing off with the same person who had deputized her to register voters.

"She told me I couldn't vote, and I really didn't get it. I was like, 'What's the problem? I meet all the requirements,'" Watson said. "I don't know how many people would go somewhere and get told no and just quit at that moment."

Watson said she doesn't think she'll be able to vote this year, and says she thinks the law was put in place to keep certain kinds of people from voting.

"Marshall is a really small town -- I mean, they still have Confederate flags when I pull into school," Watson said. "So it is a bit racist, but in the community of Wiley College, it's a diverse community."

Christina Sanders, state director for the Texas League of Young Voters Education Fund, said that her group has interacted with about half a dozen people at two voting locations in predominantly African-American and Latino neighborhoods in Houston who have been turned away because of the new law. The group hasn't done a final count, however, since people are still voting provisionally.

Voting experts say that people willing to speak out about voting troubles make up only a small percentage of the total number of Texans being disenfranchised. The majority may simply give up and go home. As Ginsburg predicted, the law “risks denying the right to vote to hundreds of thousands."
...................................................................................................................................................................

With November elections nearly upon us, the Senate race is being watched with even greater fervor. While it’s never over ’til it’s over, the numbers have long been in favor of the GOP to take the majority of seats when all is said and done. Democrats have been working and campaigning hard to make up that difference, but Republicans are still favored to win.

Assuming they do take the Senate, that will leave both houses of Congress with a GOP advantage. Most Americans don’t have a strong preference over a divided-party government or one-party majority, at least according to a September Gallup poll, which shows only four out of 10 believe it matters a “great deal” who has control of Congress. Cynics on both sides of the aisle hint that this may be a fair assessment, arguing that even if their parties take the majority, it may not matter.

“The irony of this cycle is that hundreds of millions are going to be spent fighting over an outcome that won’t impact the policy Americans see out of Washington one bit,” said a senior Washington Democrat to Time.

“We’re promising people that things will dramatically change if we win the majority, but we all know that’s not going to happen,” echoed a GOP campaign operative to the same publication. Looking at a series of graphs in a recent report from Cook Political, it’s believable that a Republican victory might even make policy efforts more difficult, rather than smoother.

What about compromise?

The report points out that while many Americans on the left say they’d like to see an increase in compromise over legislation, Republicans — Tea Party members especially — do not share that sentiment. Overall, there’s a 50% desire to compromise and a 42% desire to see candidates “stick to his/her position.” When you look at parties specifically, it shows Democrats with a 62% desire to compromise, Republicans with a 37% desire, and Tea Party members with a 32% desire.

Tie that reluctance to compromise with a majority of Republican voters’ desire to see Obamacare repealed, and there’s an almost definite policy bog for Congress members to get dragged down into. Spending a great deal of time and energy on Obamacare and a suit against Obama would be a distraction from other major issues, like immigration and tax code reform.

The report also found that direction is perceived as a significant issue, with a majority of people across parties — even in the Republican Party itself — saying that they do not believe Republicans in Congress have a strategy for handing the biggest issues that America will need to contend with in coming years. Forty-seven percent of Republicans doubt the existence of a “clear plan,” while 40% say they believe the GOP in Congress does have a plan.

The House of Representatives and John Boehner

The House of Representatives might be seeing a whole new problem, as well — more accurately, an entirely new set of them. While incoming members may be part of the Republican Party, that doesn’t mean they’ll necessarily agree with other GOP opinions. And because so many incumbents left office this year in order to retire — 25 in total — with three seats being battled out by competitors, there will be a lot of new blood in the legislature. This will likely be quite the job for House Speaker John Boehner to manage and attempt to control. The Republican Party has been particularly splinted in the last year, with far-right Tea Party politicians butting heads with more centrist Republicans.

For many, the idea of losing embedded politicians is a welcome one — people consider refreshing Congress with new faces to be a positive thing. With so many voters frustrated with the current Congress, replacing members seems an obvious solution, though incumbents have a strong advantage in being voted back, in regardless of this sentiment. However, that may not be entirely realistic.

“With 25 Republican members of Congress retiring, years of legislative expertise and wisdom are lost,” James Thurber, head of American University’s Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies, told Time. “Deep knowledge about lawmaking and policy will be replaced by highly ideological amateurs. This is a perfect formula for trouble for Speaker Boehner. He loses knowledgeable and trusted friends for an unpredictable and ungovernable caucus.”
...................................................................................................................................................................

Wednesday, October 29, 2014

...................................................................................................................................................................COMMENT: Criminally oportunitistic as they may be; the Koch brothers did not do this alone. There were thousands equally greedy, but not willing or able to take the heat, who assisted them in every way. The entire structure must be rotten for such people to flourish. One day, the right prosecutor will find the right disgruntled accomplice, and the house will fall. If politicians were honest, such people would never prosper!
...................................................................................................................................................................Koch brothers freak out in response to Rolling Stone expose
By Joan McCarter, October 29, 2014

Tim Dickinson's fantastic expose of the Koch brothers in the latest issue of Rolling Stone has gotten plenty of attention. For very good reason: it's a well-sourced, deep dive into the very toxic--literally toxic--business that earned the Kochs enough money to buy up an entire political party. That and the wrongful death judgement, six felony and numerous misdemeanor convictions, the tens of millions of dollars in fines, and the trading with Iran are all included in the story, well worth your time.

No one has given it more attention, it seems, than the notoriously thin-skinned Kochs. In typical Koch fashion, they don't argue the facts of Dickinson's story. They attack Dickinson, who responds here. Here's the nut of his detailed response.

Koch, in particular, takes umbrage with my reporting practices.

For the record: In the weeks prior to publication, beginning September 4th, Rolling Stone attempted to engage Koch Industries in a robust discussion of the issues raised in our reporting. Rolling Stone requested to interview CEO Charles Koch about his company's philosophy of Market Based Management; Ilia Bouchouev, who heads Koch's derivatives trading operations, about the company's trading practices; and top Koch lawyer Mark Holden about the company's significant legal and regulatory history.

The requests to speak to Charles Koch and Bouchouev were simply ignored. Ultimately, only Holden responded on the record, only via e-mail and only after Holden baselessly insinuated that I had been given an "opposition research" document dump from the liberal activist David Brock. (This is false.) From my perspective as a reporter, Koch Industries is the most hostile and paranoid organization I've ever engaged with--and I've reported on Fox News. In a breach of ethics, Koch has also chosen to publish email correspondence characterizing the content of a telephone conversation that was, by Koch's own insistence, strictly off the record. ["]

[I]n the main, the Koch responses attempt to re-litigate closed cases -- incidents where judges, juries, and, in one case, a Senate Select Committee, have already had a final say. They only muddy waters that have been clarified by a considered legal process.

Dickinson then provides an exhaustive, 14-point taken down of each of the Kochs' complaints about his story, including every instance in which the Kochs do not actually dispute the facts that he has reported, but attempt to obfuscate them and whine about that fact that he reported them. They also don't acknowledge that Dickinson attempted to give them the opportunity to talk to him about his story while reporting, but they refused.

The Kochs clearly do not stand up well to close scrutiny, and clearly are not prepared for it. For some reason, probably because they're richer than god, they seem to assume that they should be able to swoop into our political system and attempt to buy it without being subject to close examination. That attitude, along with their long history of abusing people, the environment, and the political system, is doing them no favors. They've made themselves the subject of this election, and if Democrats hold the Senate, it will largely be because the Kochs have made themselves such good enemies.
...................................................................................................................................................................

You've had years after the PPACA was passed, for you and your party of psychopaths and sociopaths, religious loons and Fascists, stupid and ignorant bigots, and assorted other heartless and brainless morons, to come up with an alternative health care plan.

But you insist of sticking to the Conservatives old tried-and-true health care plan:

When recent polling showed Kentucky’s U.S. Senate race tied, and the race became competitive enough for national Democrats to re-invest after walking away, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R) and his team said they were wholly unconcerned. In fact, last week, McConnell aides started passing around an internal poll showing the longtime incumbent ahead by eight points over Alison Lundergan Grimes (D).

But against the backdrop of public confidence, McConnell is so concerned, he wrote a $1.8 million check “out of his own bank account.” The Republican can afford it – McConnell’s minimum net worth is nearly $12 million – but it was the kind of move a candidate makes at the end of a race when he’s worried about the outcome.

It’s not yet clear exactly what McConnell intends to do with the $1.8 million, but it probably won’t be devoted to health care.

Two weeks ago, the Kentucky senator said he hopes to destroy the current federal health care system, including the state-based system called Kynect, which is working quite well. McConnell said it’s “fine to have a website” for a Kentucky-based marketplace, but everything else would be scrapped.

[I]f McConnell was fine keeping the website, would he also be willing to let people keep the federal assistance that helps them purchase coverage offered on that website?

The Huffington Post asked the McConnell campaign that very question the day after the debate. We asked the campaign the same question twice more that day. Then, we posed the question to them seven more times over the subsequent nine days. We also called the campaign twice. The campaign never responded.

That is, until yesterday, when a McConnell aide finally shared the senator’s full position.

Under the McConnell approach, the spokesperson told Stein, when it comes to the Affordable Care Act, everything must go – the Kynect website could exist, but consumers would no longer be eligible for subsidies to purchase coverage for themselves or their families. Medicaid expansion, coverage for young adults, prescription-drug benefits for seniors, et al, would all be eliminated as quickly as possible.

As a practical matter, McConnell, in the race of his life, is running on a curious platform: he fully intends to take health care benefits away from roughly 500,000 of his own constituents, leaving most of the state with higher premiums and worse insurance.

Team McConnell emphasizes, of course, that once the senator succeeds in tearing down the American health care system, the Republican hopes to replace it with something else, but McConnell hasn’t told anyone what the new system might look like and/or how many Kentuckians will be worse off. Working families are apparently just supposed to trust the longtime incumbent – he’ll take away their access to affordable medical care, but he’ll replace it with … something. Eventually. Maybe.

No state has been more successful in implementing health care reform than Kentucky. No senator is more desperate to destroy this success than Mitch McConnell. It’s arguably the strangest platform of any statewide candidate in the nation.
...................................................................................................................................................................

...................................................................................................................................................................The Most Brazen Attempt at Voter Suppression YetNew revelations show GOP officials in key battleground states are attempting to purge millions of minorities from the voter rolls.
By Jamelle Bouie, October 29, 2014

Let’s assume—despite what most liberals suspect—that the most vocal voter ID boosters are sincere. That, as National Review’s Rich Lowry argues in Politico, they want nothing more than to protect the vote from fraud with a minor imposition on the time and effort of prospective voters. “Where you come down on this issue,” he writes, “really depends on whether you think it’s reasonable to require the minimal effort to establish your identity by producing an ID at the ballot box or not.”

Fair enough. That’s a reasonable sentiment. Despite substantial evidence to the contrary, Republicans and other voter ID supporters don’t want to make it harder for more vulnerable voters to cast a ballot—although that’s the practical outcome of an ID requirement—they just want to secure the process and protect the integrity of the vote.

But this doesn’t explain the Republican-led push to end or limit same-day registration (condemned by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie as a “trick”) and early and weekend voting, procedures used most by minorities, black Americans in particular. Nor does it explain an incredible effort just uncovered by Al Jazeera America that could shift the direction of the midterm elections.

According to a six-month-long investigation conducted by Greg Palast for Al Jazeera, “voting officials in 27 states, almost all of them Republicans, have launched what is threatening to become a massive purge of black, Hispanic, and Asian-American voters. Already, tens of thousands have been removed from voter rolls in battleground states, and the numbers are set to climb.”

Specifically, officials have a master list of 6.9 million suspected “potential double voters.” And in Virginia, Georgia, and Washington the lists are “heavily over-weighted with names such as Jackson, Garcia, Patel, and Kim,” all common to Democratic-leaning minority groups.

The process for checking those names, a computer program called Crosscheck—touted by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a vocal supporter for voter identification—is incredibly inaccurate. “The actual lists,” notes Al Jazeera America, “show that not only are middle names mismatched, and suffix discrepancies ignored, even conflicting birthdates are disregarded. Moreover, Crosscheck deliberately ignores any Social Security mismatches, in the few instances when the numbers are even collected.”

Given the tight races in Georgia and other battleground states, even a small number of false positives could turn the tide of an election, giving a strong advantage to Republican candidates for statewide and congressional offices.

Yes, voting officials have to prune the rolls of deceased or inactive voters. The question is whether they’re taking the narrowest route and trying to avoid mistakes. They aren’t; compared with other voter lists, Crosscheck is incredibly broad with a strong bias toward removing people from the rolls. And the means for verifying voter identity—sending postcards to addresses on file—puts the burden of proof on individual voters and is almost designed to take people off the rolls; with false positives and duplicate names, there’s no guarantee that anyone gets their verification card, to say nothing of voters who have moved or don’t have a permanent address.

Whether Republican officials are trying to nudge the electorate in the GOP’s favor is almost beside the point—since, intentions aside, that’s what’s happened. And when you take this out of its isolation chamber and put it in context—a world where Republicans want voter identification and reduced early voting and stiffer registration laws—it looks like a pattern of deliberate suppression, where some officials prune voter rolls with lists of minorities while others make it harder to vote altogether.

This news comes just a day after the verdict in Georgia, where a state judge denied a petition from the New Georgia Project—a group that spearheaded registration drives across the state—to process 40,000 missing registration forms, striking a blow to voter mobilization efforts in the state. Last month, after it submitted 80,000 forms, Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp accused the group of fraud and opened an investigation into its voter drives. Soon after, thousands of forms went missing, prompting this lawsuit.

Again, it’s the pattern that makes this suspect; the consistent effort from GOP officials, lawmakers, and judges to make voting more difficult, or facilitate efforts in that direction. Conservatives across the country are working to weaken voting laws and put new barriers to the ballot box. And in every case, Democratic constituencies are those most affected.

Which is why it’s hard to take pro-ID arguments—like Rich Lowry’s—in good faith. Liberal and Democratic claims of voter suppression aren’t just about voter identification, they’re about the package of policies and techniques that burden voters and shrink the electorate in the process. Indeed, it’s worse than this. Voter ID advocates insist that their reasonable moves are intended to protect the integrity of the process and the sanctity of the vote, but the reality is that their policies have created confusion and chaos for hundreds of thousands of voters. Put another way, there’s not a serious Republican effort to expand the electorate and bring new people into the process. But there is a major one to do the opposite. And it hasn’t popped up in response to threats to the sanctity of the vote—even conservatives are beginning to acknowledge there isn’t much voter fraud—it’s emerged in a world where electorates are increasingly filled with people who don’t support Republicans. It’s brazen, it’s indefensible, and it needs to end.
...................................................................................................................................................................

...................................................................................................................................................................COMMENT:if even half of wht the republicans plan for us is true they scare the bejesus out of me. is anyone paying attention ?
...................................................................................................................................................................Hobby-Nobbing: Company Men and Republicans Attack Privacy This Election
By Hans Johnson, October 29, 2014

Jodi [sic] Ernst, Iowa's Republican candidate for Senate, even went so far as to justify gun violence in defense of privacy. "I believe in the right to defend myself and my family, whether it's from an intruder, or whether it's from the government, should they decide that my rights are no longer important," she said.

So why are Republicans at every level of government waging an assault on privacy in the state of Tennessee? And why should Americans care that some of the state's biggest names in business, one tied to past health care fraud, are leading the charge?

Tennessee's Amendment 1 would overturn privacy safeguards in the state constitution. It's a permission slip for government meddling in residents' private lives. Republicans' all-out push to pass it shows a concerted program to demolish both state and federal precedents that protect privacy, including the landmark 1965 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Griswold v Connecticut, recognizing a married woman's right to use contraceptives.

Conservatives responded to alarms about the Supreme Court's ruling this June in the Hobby Lobby case by saying consumers' health and right to exercise their rights freely were not endangered. Bill O'Reilly on Fox called allegations of any threat to privacy "propaganda" and ridiculed them as "this stuff."

The ruling handed some private corporations greater control over women workers' access to FDA-approved contraceptives. GOP candidates mostly stuck to a common response to the dramatic 5-4 decision, cheering it as pro-business but denying any broader onslaught against women or privacy. Yet the full-scale Republican attack on a constitutional protection now occurring in Tennessee, and business executives' investment in the attack, show the dimensions of their lie.For more than a decade, Republicans in Tennessee bided their time until they had the political power to attack a state supreme court ruling from 2000 that guaranteed protection against government interference in reproductive privacy. Election results four years ago gave them control of the legislature and the governor's office. But that wasn't enough. To undo a constitutional protection for privacy, voters would have to approve a change. Enter Amendment 1, which Republican legislators and GOP governor Bill Haslam placed on the November 4 ballot. The ballot measure asks voters to rewrite the constitution and hand over to lawmakers the authority to ban abortion even in the case of rape, incest, or risk to a mother's life.

Amendment 1 represents a test case in conservatives' effort to build on Hobby Lobby by using political power to remove legal and constitutional foundations for individual privacy. The campaign to pass it highlights the pivotal role of corporate money in that strategy.

Another contributor is a member of the wealthy Gregory pharmaceutical family: James Gregory of Bristol, Tenn., gave more than $50,000.

The Gregorys are no stranger to legal and political attacks on privacy. Nor are they unfamiliar with the ability of companies to profit from such attacks. In 1998, Monarch, a subsidiary of King Pharmaceuticals then headed by James' brothers Jeff and John Gregory, acquired the drug Altace, a treatment for high blood pressure. Altace, though bringing in about $90 million a year in sales for its prior owner Hoechst, had become something of an orphan. That's because Hoechst and two of its subsidiaries had come under a boycott threat from U.S. anti-abortion activists in 1994 over another Hoechst subsidiary, Roussel Uclaf, and its product RU-486, or mifepristone.

Mifepristone is a manufactured steroid that inhibits fertilized eggs from implanting in a woman's uterus. It allows for patients, under a doctor's guidance and with a prescription, to end an unwanted pregnancy safely up to 9 weeks after conception without surgery. Political interference in the drug-approval process by the extreme right wing delayed but did not ultimately quash access to RU-486 in the U.S. In 2000, the FDA approved mifepristone for American physicians to use. It has proved remarkably safe and effective, and reduced the need for surgical abortions. More than a third of abortions in the first two months of unwanted pregnancies now involve the treatment.

Meanwhile, the acquisition of Altace by Monarch and King amid the anti-abortion politicking, proved immensely lucrative for the Gregorys. They became some of the most generous donors in conservative politics. John founded the Tennessee Conservative Political Action Committee and helped create the Family Action Council to lead the attack on the rights of LGBT people and families in the state. Federal campaign financial disclosure records indicate that in 2005, he tried to give $250,000 to the Republican National Committee, nearly all of which it returned because the sum vastly exceeded allowable donation limits. James Gregory, like his three brothers, became one of the most generous donors to far-right, Tea-Party candidates, such as Sharron Angle in Nevada and Richard Mourdock in Indiana, who called pregnancies resulting from rape "something that God intended to happen."

The Gregory name on donations to pass Amendment 1 highlights the role of corporate money in attacking privacy. But the Gregorys, among the largest donors to Republican politics in Tennessee, need the GOP and its Tea-Party extreme to carry out the assault. Congressional Tea-Party caucus member Stephen Fincher gave $10,000. He made headlines in 2013 for invoking the Bible to call food stamps a handout and demand cuts, all while having accepted more than $3 million in federal farm subsidies. His fellow Republican member of the House, Marsha Blackburn, gave $1,200. More than 15 state lawmakers, including a who's-who of the Republican-dominated state House, made financial donations. So did several county Republican parties. Even Republican U.S. senator Lamar Alexander got into the act, donating $200.

Under the guise of conservatism and limited government, Republican politicians are leveraging corporate donors to build on the Hobby Lobby ruling and roll back legal safeguards on privacy. In 2006, one of the advocacy groups now waging the battle against privacy in Tennessee gave the Gregory family "much credit for the shift in Tennessee's political landscape." For women and residents worried about government intrusion into their personal decisions, that shift tilts the playing field severely, against ordinary people.

Less than a century ago, in 1920, Tennessee lawmakers ratified the 19th Amendment that allowed American women the right to vote in federal elections. The current drive by Republicans and corporate allies to uproot safeguards for privacy and women's rights undermines that legacy. And it threatens basic rights at the core of our republic, as more than two generations of Americans have come to know it.
...................................................................................................................................................................

Away from the Halloween funhouse mirror, the reality is this: Reid is willing to hold votes — but not with an endless open amendment process that merely creates a stage for Republican political theater. “Poison pill” amendments on partial birth abortions and gay marriage would sprout everywhere.

The real problem is that Senate Republicans can’t agree on which amendments to attach to bills because of the Tea Party versus Establishment war raging among them.

Yet I’ve personally seen voters nodding in agreement at Senate debates and campaign events as Republicans put the fright-night mask on Reid as the evil ogre responsible for dysfunction in the Senate.

The GOP is having success by repeating this distorted version of political life on Capitol Hill. Their tactic on that score is consistent with an overall strategy that includes blocking President Obama’s nominees to courts, federal agencies and ambassadorial posts while condemning any mistakes made by the administration.

According to the Senate’s website, there are currently 156 nominations pending on the executive calendar.

With all of the fear-mongering by Republican candidates over the administration’s response to Ebola — part of a broader approach to scare voters by undermining faith in government, the president and all Democrats — there is one screaming nomination still pending that reveals the corruption of the GOP strategy.

The nation has not had a surgeon general since November 2013 because the GOP is blocking the president’s nominee, Dr. Vivek Murthy. At a time of medical emergency, what is the Republicans’ problem with Murthy?

In October 2012, the doctor tweeted: “Tired of politicians playing politics w/guns, putting lives at risk b/c they’re scared of the NRA. Guns are a health care issue.”

Dr. Murthy, a graduate of Harvard and the Yale School of Medicine, has impressive credentials for a 36-year-old. He created a breakthrough new company to lower the cost of drugs and bring new drugs to market more quickly.

But his big sin, for Senate Republicans, is that as a veteran of emergency rooms Dr. Murthy expressed his concern about the nation’s indisputable plague of gun violence.

When Dr. Murthy was nominated, the National Rife Association announced plans to “score” a vote on the doctor’s nomination, meaning any Republican or Democrat running in a conservative state who voted for Murthy would be punished in NRA literature and feel the pain in their fundraising come midterm election season.

When public anxiety over Ebola became a GOP talking point, 29 House Democrats wrote to Reid calling for the Senate to expose the Republicans for their deceitful strategy. They wanted, and still want, Senate Democrats to push for a vote on the surgeon general nominee and force the Republicans to explain their opposition. Their thinking is that swift action is needed to put a surgeon general in place and give the American people a trusted source of guidance on Ebola.

The Tea Party’s favorite senator, Republican Ted Cruz of Texas, last week agreed on the need for a surgeon general in a CNN interview. But in the funhouse mirror-style so loved by the Republican base, Cruz blamed Obama for the vacancy.

“Of course we should have a surgeon general in place,” Cruz told CNN’s Candy Crowley. “And we don’t have one because President Obama, instead of nominating a health professional, he nominated someone who is an anti-gun activist.”

Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) was also put on the spot recently over the GOP’s refusal to deal with the surgeon general vacancy. As he railed against the president for perceived errors in handling the situation, NBC’s Chuck Todd interrupted to ask: “The NRA said they were going to score the vote and suddenly everybody froze him… Seems a little petty in hindsight, doesn’t it?”

“Well, the president really ought to nominate people that can be confirmed to these jobs, and frankly then we should confirm them, there’s no question about that,” said the senator, trying to find his footing as he backpedaled.

The fact remains that Senate Republicans, in lockstep with the NRA, have left a worthy nominee dangling while this vital post remains vacant.

This kind of game playing is what led Senate Democrats to consider using the so-called “nuclear option.” In its original form, it would have changed the Senate rules to require a simple majority for all confirmations, instead of the current 60-vote supermajority. But the Democrats decided to go with a more modest change that allowed a simple majority vote to confirm only federal judicial nominees, not presidential picks for the Supreme Court, the cabinet or the position of surgeon general.

Reid, speaking on the Senate floor this summer, said that despite the rules change “Republicans are still continuing to try and slow everything down…It is just that they want to do everything they can to slow down [Obama’s] administration, to make him look bad…even though they’re the cause of the obstruction… Everyone will look at us and say, Democrats control the Senate — why aren’t they doing more?”

As a matter of brazen politics, the Republican strategy of obstruction has worked.What a shame.
...................................................................................................................................................................

Tuesday, October 28, 2014

...................................................................................................................................................................COMMENT:Stay classy, POS! (Party Of Stupid). I live just 25 mi. from where this tragedy occurred. It is, as the Grandmother clearly states, a County issue. If they had recognized the problem at some point in the 15 reports the State may have gotten involved, but that was not the case. The POS is going off the deep end here in MN. They're still pissed we have a Blue majority in both Houses and a Blue Gov. They're determined to throw as much fecal matter as they can into these races to see how much sticks. Of course, all the POS candidates claim they're 'good Christians', yet stoop to the lowest levels of lies & hypocrisy we've ever seen here.
...................................................................................................................................................................Republicans Reject Grandmother’s Request To Pull Attack Ad Featuring Her Murdered Grandson
By Amelia Rosch, October 23, 2014; updated October 24, 2014

The Minnesota Republican Party has refused to take down an ad showing a murdered child even after the child’s grandmother, Yvonne Dean, asked them to stop airing it immediately.

The ad blames Democratic governor Mark Dayton for the death of 4-year-old Eric Dean, who was killed by his stepmother following the failure of state services to intervene. Yvonne Dean said that the party never contacted her family or asked for permission to use a picture of Eric. “I just can’t believe somebody would use [Eric's death] for political gain,” she told the Minnesota Star Tribune. “To use our family’s tragedy is crossing the line.”

According to Dean, when she called the Minnesota Republican Party this morning she was told that they would not stop broadcasting the ad on television. A member of the National Republican Senatorial Committee denounced the advertisement,saying “there is no place in politics for this kind of advertisement.” A spokesman for Dayton’s opponent, Jeff Johnson, declined to comment.

Watch the ad: [As of today, "This video has been removed by the user."]

In February 2013, Eric Dean died of a perforated small intestine following abuse by his stepmother. An investigative piece by the Star Tribune following his death found that there were 15 reports to child protection about the abuse but only one, involving a broken arm, was passed onto the police.The article reported that Minnesota agencies did not follow up on 71 percent of reports involving suspected abuse and that family assessment programs are used in the place of abuse investigations 70 percent of the time. This spring, the state legislature passed a law limiting how child protection services could use past abuse reports when deciding whether to pursue new investigations.

Dean, who says she’s a Republican, said that it was “unfair” to blame Dayton for the death because “system failed Eric at the county level…how could that be Governor Dayton’s fault?”

Dayton has been consistently beating Johnson in the polls. The advertisement is still up on Minnesota GOP’s Youtube page, while their website includes a link to it.
...................................................................................................................................................................

...................................................................................................................................................................COMMENT: The political right knows its days are numbered and are past the point where they can win elections based on the strength of their ideas. So, they resort to anything they can to stymie the democratic process and make it as hard to vote as possible. The fact that tens of thousands of new voter registrations can disappear with no explanation is highly disturbing and possibly criminal.
...................................................................................................................................................................40,000 Voter Registrations Have Mysteriously Vanished, Could Determine Control Of The Senate
By Alice Ollstein, October 26, 2014

A court could decide any day now whether tens of thousands of Georgia voters can cast a ballot this November, a choice that could sway the outcome of the state’s neck-and-neck races for Governor and Senator.

Earlier this year, organizers fanned out across nearly every one of Georgia’s 159 counties and registered nearly 90 thousand people who have never voted in their lives, most of them people of color, many of them under 25 years old. But when the groups checked back in late August, comparing their registration database to the state’s public one, they noticed about 50,000 of the registrations had vanished, nearly all of them belonging to people of color in the Democratic-leaning regions around Atlanta, Savannah and Columbus.

Georgia’s state minority leader Stacy Abrams (D), whose group The New Georgia Project led the massive registration drive in March and April, told ThinkProgress what happened next was “deeply disturbing.”

“We asked the Secretary of State to meet with us. We wanted to understand if we were doing something wrong, or if there was another database we didn’t have access to. But he refused to meet with us,” she said.

Joined by the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and the Georgia NAACP, the organizers asked twice more for a meeting about the missing registrations. When early voting began across the state and they still had not heard from the Secretary of State, the New Georgia Project took them to court. In arguments on Friday, Francys Johnson, president of the Georgia NAACP, asked Fulton County Superior Court Judge Christopher Brasher to compel the state to process every valid registration.

“In 2000, 2004, 2008, 2012, we were only able to know there were problems when it was too late, when people started showing up to the polls and they were not on the voter rolls, and folks were already disenfranchised,” Johnson explained to ThinkProgress over the phone. “We must catch that disenfranchisement before it takes place.”

Lawyers for Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp and three counties who are also the target of the suit countered that state law sets no deadlines for processing voter registrations, and emphasized that any voter unsure of their registration status can always cast a provisional ballot. Those who do so must return within three days to present additional documentation or otherwise cure any problem with the system. But the NAACP and New Georgia Project called this remedy “unacceptable.”

“I cannot tell you what little return we actually see in terms of provisional ballots,” Johnson said. “The election is decided the night of the election. It’s not really a ballot at all.”

Even if every one of the registrations in limbo does get processed and added to the voter rolls by Election Day, Johnson says the uncertainty has still been “problematic.” Because the 40,000-odd voters have not yet received their registration cards in the mail that tells them which precinct they’re assigned to, “this ambiguity may discourage people from going to out to vote, and those who do go won’t know where to go, and they’ll be shuffled around from polling place to polling place.”

Amidst this chaos, the Secretary of State publicly accused the New Georgia Project in September of submitting fraudulent registration forms. A subsequent investigation found just 25 confirmed forgeries out of more than 85,000 forms—a fraud rate of about 3/100ths of 1 percent.

Abrams explained to ThinkProgress that all other third party registration groups must submit every form they get no matter if it’s incomplete or forged. She characterized the subpoena and accusations as an attempt to intimidate and discredit her efforts.

“If you accuse people of fraud, the public will believe there is fraud, just like if you yell ‘fire,’ people run,” she said. “The problem is, if there is no fire, you’re causing damage, and if there is no fraud, you’ve damaged reputations.”

Dr. Francys Johnson agreed, but ThinkProgress the accusations have not worked as the state may have intended.“If they thought it would have a chilling effect on voter registration efforts, they were mistaken. It has emboldened our efforts. It has awakened the consciousness of people that the right to vote is still precariously endangered.”

The legal battle comes at a pivotal time for the state of Georgia. The state’s African-American, Latino, Asian and Native American populations have grown extensively, as has their share of the electorate. The growth is dramatic enough that many political analysts predict the state’s political identity could swing from red to blue over the next few years.

At the same time these changes were taking place, the state enacted measures courts have found to disproportionately impact voters of color. In 2006, Georgia enacted a “strict” voter ID law. Five years later the state cut the number of days of early voting. In 2012, the Secretary of State purged thousands of voters from the rolls a few months before the presidential election. Just last month, the same Secretary of State lamented before an audience of Republican activists that the registration of more voters of color would mean a win for Democrats.

Abrams told ThinkProgress she launched the registration effort to make sure the officials in local, state and national office actually represented the people of the state.

“We are facing a new Georgia: demographically, politically, economically, and socially,” she said. “We should all be engaged in a process to bring them into the civic conversation. It is dangerous, no matter your party, to have large swaths of your population disengaged and disaffected.”

A ruling from Judge Brasher could come at any time, and based on his remarks during Friday’s hearing, Abrams says she is not optimistic for a ruling in her favor. The New Georgia Project can appeal, but with the election less than two weeks away, the window is getting narrow for forcing the state to process the registrations.

Even as she vowed to continue reaching out over the coming years to the hundreds of thousands of remaining unregistered voters in Georgia, Abrams said her “deepest fear” is that many of the newly registered young voters will by turned off voting for life if they can’t cast a regular ballot this November.

“Fast-forward ten years, and you’ll have a majority-minority population that has even less power than it has right now, because they’ll have become so disengaged, ” she warned. “And the people with power will solidify that power and put up barriers to any possible change.”

One concrete way this could happen is the next time the state revises its voting maps, in 2020. The governor elected in 2018 will have the final say on those maps, which could be gerrymandered to benefit one political party for many years to come.
...................................................................................................................................................................